it does genuinely piss me off how much of the greatest things about my old school was built off the blood sweat and tears of this one incredible passionate lovely teacher and they never ever ever gave him anything in return until he left for a better school during my a levels 😐 and then I had to have the shittiest teacher alive for othello instead of him who would have slayed it and I'm NOT bitter about it out all

I took Arthurian lit in college and I enjoyed it so much!!

Did you actually? That's so cool! That actually sounds like a lot of fun!

I really miss studying literature... I really wanted to study English lit for a long time, but then I ended up changing my mind and going for philosophy, and even though I love it, I miss breaking down texts and reading fiction...

Honestly, when I first saw this... the following combination came to mind:

King Arthur – Satoru (because of the idea of being a king being almost like being given the title of 'the strongest' & being most powerful)

Lancelot – Suguru (because of the idea of devotion, service, duty, care & his personality comes a little more subdued? Like I read the Steinbeck version, and his Lancelot resonated with me, and I can kind of see Suguru in that role? Like there was a speech there, I remember, of Lancelot talking about he cannot take on a wife as he doesn't want to leave her husbandless as that would be unfair to her? He is chained by his duty, and he would be thinking of war in bed and of bed in war, and he doesn't want to be half a human, and the code of knights just ensnares him and requires his full devotion to servitude... To me, that speech was just so resigned? Like so full of acceptance I found it heartbreaking... And I guess that kind of resonates with Suguru, too, in that he devotes himself to his ideals – he may know that he may never reach his goals, but he will continue to persevere? I read it a while back, and I didn't study English lit at university so my interpretations may be off, but that's what I remember...)

Guinevere – Reader (because of her connection to both Arthur & Lancelot mainly tbh)

Tbh it's been a very long time since I've thought about this! (And, I'm ashamed to say this, a long time since I've read a fiction book, so seeing this ask was fun!)

I remember I had this teacher in sixth form who, instead of teaching us set texts relevant for the exam, in the first term taught us nothing related to the course, and instead decided to teach us a chronology of English literature through poetry, as well as some of his favourite books. I remember reading about 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' and that's kind of how I found myself reading a little more, and then coming across Steinbeck's 'The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights'. I kind of read it in part because not many people applying for English, or so I've been told, focus on older stuff, but then I found myself genuinely getting into it. I never ended up applying that knowledge, though, as I ended up going for a different subject in the end!

These are just my thoughts... I'd be curious to hear what you think!!

(Also, Sab, I may not be the best person at talking about feelings as I'm emotionally a little obtuse, but I sincerely hope you're holding up okay. I never experienced such profound loss in my life, I will admit, so I can never know what it's like to experience it, but just know that I will be thinking of you and wishing you, sincerely, all the very best.)

I did! I was an English lit major and I loved it so much - I loved my English dept — almost every professor was so nice. philosophy is such a good choice though!! I wish I took philosophy classes when I was in college - I had turned my nose up at it because I thought it was pretentious haha (but I realized how cool it was when I watched the good place!!)

the way our minds went in the same direction and I really want to write like a mini series about this — maybe 2-3 parts just chronicling this

I completely agree with your choices — it’s been a hot minute since I read any Arthurian lit so I’ll have to brush up but I love this concept and I love writing period pieces even though it takes extra effort :)

(I appreciate your well wishes so much — it’s so sweet and I love you for it. I cannot express in words what it means. I’m doing as well as I can. There’s some days I’m okay and others where I’m very much not — and there’s some that are a mix of both! but I’m trying to be kind to myself. And it always helps when you all are nothing but kind to me. So truly thank you 🥹💕)

Testimony, Log 4: Are you able or disabled to do the job and how do you know?

I’ve had PTSD, trichotillomania, general anxiety disorder and bipolar depression since I was seven years old. I know this now after years of therapy and prescribed medications through various psychiatrists, psychologists, cognitive behavioral therapists, and psychiatric nurses. I’ve been seeing medical professionals in these fields since I was 28 years old. I am currently 49 years old. So, I’ve spent over 20 years trying to get help for these medical illnesses. Along with these medical illnesses there are symptoms. This is how the medical community determines what kinds of mental health illnesses you have and how to treat them. My particular mental health issues are considered to be chronic. I will always have these illnesses. While my mental health issues are considered to be without cure, with ongoing treatment, they can be reduced in their severity and there is great hope that I can not only function in society, but thrive in a career. Since I didn’t realize what my illnesses were until I was 22 years of age, the symptoms from these co-morbid conditions have dominated my daily life and social interactions my entire life. The symptoms range in severity and there are many symptoms that can occur when you have these illnesses. 

When I was seven years old, my second grade teacher noticed that I was pulling my hair out, going bald all over my head, and leaving the pulled strands of hair all over the floor around every desk I sat at. This prompted her to alert my mother. At the time (1975) trichotillomania (considered to be related to OCD) was not well known in society, so my mother did the best thing she could do and she took me to a dermatologist who prescribed me coal tar shampoo.

After beginning treatment with medical professionals at the age of 28, the link between childhood sexual, physical, and verbal abuse was made.

Trust issues play an important role in building relationships. Developing the ability to trust people again was and still is at the core of my treatment from the medical community. There were and are many other treatment options available based on ongoing research by medical professionals. As someone with multiple illnesses (PTSD being the dominant one), I keep up with ongoing research efforts based on the diagnoses I’ve been given because it helps me understand my illnesses and it helps me to manage the symptoms too; this is similar to a diabetic watching their diet or an allergy sufferer avoiding certain environments or products. But PTSD was not determined as the dominant illness until the last year. It was part of the co-morbid collection of illnesses, but not considered to be the illness causes the most debilitating health and social problems I was having. OCD and depression were the dominant illnesses determined by medical professionals on IUP’s campus and by external medical professionals up until 2007-2011 when Indiana Community Guidance Center began helping me. It was at this time that PTSD became the dominant illness affecting and effecting me. 

In 2003, I went to IUP to study in the Composition and Rhetoric Department and had a crush on a professor there, Claude Mark Hurlbert. Despondent that he did not want to start a relationship with me, alone in Indiana, PA, and not having a strong network of social relationships to begin with, I fell into a major depressive episode and called a friend, Irene Pannetier, who also studied composition and rhetoric at IUP. She asked me why I was so upset (crying uncontrollably and talking of suicide). I told her the whole story and elaborated on my life extensively. Then, the first day of the school week after this incident I began getting medical help through IUP’s mental health services. They diagnosed me with OCD/Trichotillomania, generalized anxiety and depression and prescribed me Luvox after trying several other medications. All of these events in the Fall 2003 semester occurred before Irene and several other composition and rhetoric students decided to use a research taping device to tape conversations I had with Irene and spread the taped conversations throughout the English Dept.

Fast forward to 2006-2007, during the time I was seeing medical professionals at Indiana Community Guidance Center, it was determined that the behaviors witnessed by members of the English Dept. and my own details of what I was experiencing, led to a determination that the dominant illness at this time was PTSD with co-morbid OCD, generalized anxiety, and depression as present, but not dominant in terms of my symptoms. 

I had a mental breakdown due to specific triggers. Triggers for PTSD sufferers are any social act (verbal, physical, visual, olfactory [sense of smell], etc.) that causes someone with PTSD to relive past traumatic events and begin acting and feeling and returning to those states of mind that were experienced when the initial traumas occurred. My particular triggers involved every form of trauma I experienced: a certain smile that was similar to a sexual predator’s own smile during the time I was sexually abused, someone grabbing me in a violent manner, enraged yelling and extreme acts of violence, insinuations about my sexuality, a certain look that is leering combined with the position someone has physically to your own and how they hover around you. 

So, Indiana Community Guidance Center, like other medical professionals before them, including IUP’s Mental Health professionals, asked me for details about my life at the time when my mental health symptoms began (age 7, pulling my hair out). The details of my appointments with the medical professionals at Indiana Community Guidance Center were being given to IUP, notably IUP’s English Dept. in order to help me, and them, through the behaviors I was exhibiting and relieve faculty and students’ own feelings of discomfort about how I was acting. I was not informed that Indiana Community Guidance Center was working with IUP’s English Dept. by providing details of my medical diagnoses and therapy sessions. This would violate FERPA, HIPAA, and perhaps other laws and policies.

Instead of helping me, though, the details of my therapy sessions were used to further harass me. The weird smile became prevalent in IUP’s English Dept., then at other colleges where I taught. It was used when someone wanted to keep me in line, threaten me, taunt me for the sake of it. Loud noises were made around me if someone didn’t like something I said or did. Sexually suggestive language began to be used. Side glances, getting very close to me from behind. When I was upset that Lingyan Yang was coughing uncontrollably behind me at an IUP event on campus, coughing became another trigger because now not only was I experiencing trauma triggers from my life before IUP, but I was now also experiencing new trauma triggers from my experiences while studying at IUP. Any taped details that related to my traumatic experiences were then added to their repertoire of harassment and micro-aggression. So, one therapy session I had with Indiana Community Guidance Center, for example, involved breast size discussions in my family growing up. Breast size became a topic of conversation on campuses. Staring at people’s body parts, including women’s breasts, people’s behinds, people’s faces, staring into space, became like memes. I was aware of all of this now being placed on social media. I was aware of the “allergens” and “snow” expanding from IUP to other campuses, to outside academia, to local people’s awareness, to regional, national, and finally to international awareness and surveillance.

At the Sheraton Inn while at an conference in Vancouver, Canada, I was in a colleague’s hotel room and we were discussing an event featuring Gayatri Spivak among other noted scholars. My colleague opened up about the harassment she was experiencing on her own campus. People insinuated she was a lesbian too, she said because she was never married and single and she felt they didn’t understand her or her culture (she is an immigrant from India). I replied that they were using it (calling her a lesbian) as a method of attacking her and not because they understood what it meant to be a lesbian. Our conversation also included a discussion of a man I met at the conference that seemed to be interested in having dinner with me. This led to a discussion of Jeffrey Williams, who I liked at the time. The specific words used in my conversation, the themes I explored, and previous texts from conversations were then discussed by people I worked with and I noticed them appearing on T.V.

No one would tell me that I was being taped. When I discussed the idea that I was being taped, it was suggested that I make an appointment with my psychiatrist/therapist. When I told my psychiatrist about all of the textual and behavioral connections I was making, they increased my medication dosage, added some new ones at times, and focused their attention on my paranoia. But this only made me more paranoid and at the same time increasingly aware that I was being taped and the contents of the taped recordings were being used to defend their actions, which by now they realized would surely lead to a lawsuit. My ability to think clearly and perform my duties as a teacher and scholar decreased as the years went on.

When I informed IUP’s campus police that Mahmoud Amer was stalking me, there was no effort to at least inform me that they investigated the situation and a report was filed (Clery Act). IUP also did not inform me that Mahmoud Amer used my laptop’s webcam to film me in my apartment. The only clue I had about Mr. Amer’s act was from IUP’s website homepage the next day: there was a photo of Gian Pagnucci taken in his office with his computer on and the webcam lit up. Gian had a really wide smile on his face. It was then I realized that whatever I was doing in front of my laptop was being filmed. 

From 2004 to 2017, it became increasingly more difficult to interact with students, develop lesson plans, remember words, ideas, definitions, what I was going to say next, organize my thoughts, organize my writing, make connections and function cognitively while outside of work. My social interactions and health status did not improve when IUP decided to have Indiana Community Guidance Center provide them with details of my therapy sessions. In fact, my mental state and social interactions became much worse. The medicines I was being put on were causing me to lose more sleep, gain a tremendous amount of weight, and some of the side effects were similar to the symptoms of the illnesses they were treating!

Enter 2013. I graduated from IUP with my Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism. I moved back to NJ after I realized that I wasn’t going to find full time, tenure-track, or post doc appointments in Pennsylvania. While in NJ I applied for several different positions at various colleges. My situation became even worse, but because I returned home I at least had the comfort of people and surroundings that were foundational to my identity, the parts of my identity that I have always relied on to help me through my life. 

With the same strategy they used via illegal surveillance, IUP’s faculty, students, alumni, and staff attacked my teaching and research based on what they knew were my own abilities: discourse analysis. Since I was intensely hypervigilant for years, coupled with the knowledge that I was being taped, my regular self-consciousness became completely debilitating. And, whatever I did in this “reality” show, was used to argue that I could be hired or should not be hired by the educational institutions I applied to. It seemed/seems like everyone knows everything about me and can use this information to get me hired, fired, in love, out of love, friended/unfriended, housed/unhoused, silenced, killed, hospitalized, and made more ill than ever if they wanted to do so. 

See all of my previous posts regarding this trial for connections to this testimony.